www.NewVentures.ca

So, I have been working in Ubuntu for a while now and I have to admit – I’m liking it more and more. Which is really no surprise with my work background being in Unix. But I have to admit it’s rather nice not to come into the office and not find the computer rebooted or needing a reboot because it is crawling to a stop.

My biggest challenge of late has been scanning. To date, it hasn’t been possible in Linux and the main reason for this is because my scanner wasn’t supported ( no one wrote the programs necessary for it to talk with the computer in Linux. ) For those who are interested it was an LiDE 80 from Canon. It’s a great scanner and will even do slides and negatives, just not in Linux though.

While there had been several promising efforts towards getting something “sometime soon” the main developer of that particular software eventually pulled the plug on it. Canon’s scanners, as well as several other manufacturers, are almost unique in every version and writing code for one scanner, is no guarantee that it will work with the next… (Continue reading…)

So my wife ran into a little problem a couple of weeks back. She had visited one of these online sites where you can design business cards and the like and she had spent some time developing something that she thought suitable for her business but wanted to review it with a couple of people first and unfortunately there was no way of saving her creation – it was either order or logoff… neither of which worked for what she wanted to do. So I got called in.

The first problem was that she didn’t already have a screen capture utility ( software which will allow you to copy what is on the screen as a picture ) and the second was that since she had already designed the card she didn’t want to have to close down the window and or computer to install any new software ( which is quite common with Windows unfortunately. ) So it took a bit of doing but…

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As you may, or may not, have noticed my website was down for a while. Just about a week actually….

The problem was, possibly, a “gremlin” which is my name for a random piece of computer activity that just decides to go off and do it’s own thing, with no relationship to anything that it was currently doing. They usually happen once and hardly ever repeat themselves. It is possible that it also may have been a bad piece of code, which I am currently working on trying to find ( one is never too sure of everything when it comes to computers! )

One of the reasons why the system (and all the others that are hosted from the same provider that I use ) was down was because a process owned by one of my websites was using all the resources on one of the servers that my service provider has.

They used a help-desk utility to log the problem which supposedly sent me an email notifying me of this problem AND then locked out all my websites and shut down all my processes until I responded that I would “fix” the problem…

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Dumb title – yeah I know – but I thought I would try to help those just browsing titles to get an idea what the article may be about ( yet another one of those “changes” that I am implementing – we’ll see how well this one goes…) By the way, this article is pretty technical for those who aren’t interested in such things…

So, riding a high from my WordPress experiences yesterday, I decided that it would be time to tackle my Samba and NTFS sharing issues with WIndows with two goals in mind:

1. To be easily share files from my Ubuntu machine with other Windows computers within my network
2. To be able to access shared Windows folders within my network with my Ubuntu machine

A bit of background here… While I have had years of experience with ( now quite older versions of ) Unix and Linux, I’ve never had the opportunity to utilize, let alone become acquainted with sharing Unix files across a Windows network and have never had the opportunity to try and mix/share folders and processes between Windows and Linux….. so this is all really quite new to me!

I have tried previously to tackle this issue ( with limited success ) and have always tried to do it the way I did it before, by using the command line or terminal access. So imagine my surprise when, after searching on the network for other ideas, I found a You-Tube video that showed how to do it all ( well a good portion anyways ) using graphic tools already built into the Ubuntu box!

The video was a little dated ( working with Version 6.01 while I had 8.04 ) but similar enough that I could follow along and discern or figure out the differences. The really, REALLY amazing thing is that it worked first time! Not that it shouldn’t have, but that it was so easy!

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As you may have ( or not ) noticed, I’ve been working on some of my problem pages recently ( which for the most part many have been temporarily fixed.) During my search for knowledge, I have come across some pretty amazing and interesting web sites and a few of them have had a quick and easy Index of archives available for quick research and perusal. It goes without saying now, that I wanted one of those too!

Annual and/or monthly indexes are nice if you are trying to catch up on your reading of a blog or subscription that you haven’t had the chance to check for a while,. But heck, most people use RSS feeds for that sort of stuff and when it comes to researching it is a real pain to have to open up individual pages hoping to find the gem you are looking for. Plus ( such as in my case ) most archives are set to monthly with only 10 on a page – which make matters worse! ( Not forgetting to mention that my on-site search engine isn’t working right either! )

So with my goal for a single listing ( all on one page ) of all my postings yet another search was underway. It was actually amazing how few resources addressed this issue. Most of the hits that I found pertained to tweaking the original Archive.php file within your original WordPress theme pack, but none on how to build a single page document for easy access!

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